


Between the Lines

by Opacifica



Series: Tailspinning Into the Epilogues with Dirk and Jake [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: But You Have To Wade Though A Lot Of Meaningful Banter To Get There, Established Relationship, Explicit Discussion Of Transness Through Jakefilter, Explicit Sexual Content, Extensive Earth C Worldbuilding, Extensive Jake-ing, Jade-Jake Friendship Meaningfully Explored, M/M, Trans Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:55:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25120492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: “It’s just… I can’t remember the last time I felt so at peace, I guess. It was such a lovely jaunt with Jade, and instead of being all torn up about coming home, I feel even better, now. It’s actually been a real while and a half since I felt… bad, you know? Like actually bad.”You don’t have much in the way of emotional permanence about that sort of thing. Surely it was months ago, when you were staring gloomily at the bottoms of bottles like the world’s most up-his-own-ass useless overdramatic dilettante. Did it even really happen, if it all, in hindsight, just seems like a dumb pantomime of misery to get attention? A successful dumb pantomime of misery to get attention, mind you, you definitely got it, and a boyfriend to boot. Was it ever really as atrocious and apocalyptic and unsurvivable as it seemed?
Relationships: Jake English/Dirk Strider
Series: Tailspinning Into the Epilogues with Dirk and Jake [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1819627
Comments: 7
Kudos: 65





	Between the Lines

There are no doors in his apartment. Just big windows, and lots of them. Single-pane, easy to swing open. It’s been a few months since they got a good wash, seeing as it really has to be you or him to do the job, what with the structure supported by massive steel girders two hundred feet above your mansion. But they let in the light of the setting sun, and you’re glad to be back here.

It’s weird to be alone in Dirk's ‘pad slash workshop’, of course. You kind of gambled on him being back by now, though that was contingent on your going theory that he somehow deliberately coordinated the Annual Strilonde Family Symposium With Your Host Dave Strider to coincide with your long-planned, similarly annual two-week camping trip with Jade.

Smart of him, really. Or it would’ve been. You know it’s been hard on him, in the past, the way you sort of have to not be with him sometimes, and you figured it would be even worse now that you’re actually _dating_ -dating, inamorato-for-realsies, the full fuckening in addition to the rest. Especially a challenge since it’s nearly April, and his show, Deific Beats, is done filming. 

Double-especially after he’s literally just wrapped that particular project for good, to shift gears to greater and stupider television shows.

It’s easier to handle each other when there’s a schedule, you think, as there sort of has been, lately. Easier to do anything when there are built-in reasons to take breaks, peel off and do things on your own. You feel less guilty and cagey about not hanging around with him twenty-four-seven, he feels less like you’re avoiding him or else getting bored of him for the same reasons.

It all seems so superabundantly clear when it’s not actively happening, what all of your problems are. Clear as the windows after a good scrub-down. You really did think this was the day he planned to come home, right? You squint out through the silvery sheen of dust, lowlit by sunlight streaming up from the horizon. With any luck he’ll be home before dark.

Checking your phone, which you haven’t been doing since you left - Jade made you send a text to every one of your contacts confirming that you’d be off the map, in the mountains, enjoying the bliss of rolling around in the mud and arguing over old family stories with your more outdoors-y inclined ectochild - he hasn’t messaged you once.

You had kind of thought he might at least drop you a group photo or something, to see once you got back within cell range, but you’re weirdly impressed that he didn’t. In part because you know he would have agonized about having done so for at least a day or two after, whether that was clingy of him, and that it would have wrecked any hope of genuinely enjoying his time with his family.

Huh. So that’s good, isn’t it, that the last message between the two of you was yours.

JAKE: Heya sending around a quick missive before i head out! Jades counseled me that theres no way on gods green earth… _our_ green earth? Haha. The mountains in which well be gallivanting are notoriously disconnected from cell service and i wont be able to read anything! If anyone is trying to get in touch with me for whatever reason please pass that on im sending this same message to everyone whose contact i have in my phone but i dont save a lot of numbers so... whoops. Well be back on the fifth probably late afternoon so if anything urgent but not THAT urgent is afoot dont hesitate to let me know and ill get back to you then!!!

Maybe he’s not pleased that you sent him the copy-and-pasted version, but it’s better than nothing, Jade assured you. And you couldn’t send him something _personal_ , which would certainly read as ‘oh, hey, Dirk, I know this is a thing I’ve done before vis-a-vis disappearing thoroughly and you made it very clear it was terrible and made you feel like a crazy person, but guess what, I’m doing it again, with a little advance-planning, so try not to be so hysterical and ridiculous this time! I obviously don’t think you’re capable of controlling yourself at all! I am an asshole! See you in two weeks please enjoy stewing in my shitty careless lack of regard for your feelings and generally low expectations of you! I will leave it ambiguous whether I hate you of course because I, Jake English, am the worst human being alive.’

Jade did not think it would have come off quite that bad, but you were adamant that sending one copy-and-pasted to _everyone_ , especially the other Strilondes he’d be hanging around with, would keep him from feeling singled out.

Though in a way that was singling him out, wasn’t it? Except - except he definitely needed to hear it, Jade gives great Dirk-advice and she said it would be the height of rudeness to send nothing, even after saying goodbye and sort of circuitously mentioning the lack of service thing in person.

You hope he isn’t upset with you. There’s really no reason to think he would be. He doesn’t really _get_ upset with you, which is its own small but legitimate can of worms. You’d almost feel better if he would just occasionally have it out with you the way you used to. You’ve been just as careful not to do anything to _make_ him cross, and to quash any irritation itching in your hindbrain before it blossoms into anything real.

That’s partially why the making-space thing, the both-of-you-fucking-off-to-disparate-locations-and-friend-groups deal, was such a good idea. Possibly. Unless it wasn’t, in which case it wasn’t. You _did_ say you’d be home by late afternoon, but you didn’t specify a time, and all he said in person was that Dave and Rose’s (ironic?) minute-by-minute itinerary concluded on the morning of the fifth, which is _today_.

Ugh. You’re not sure why you’re so nervous. It’s not that you’re sincerely afraid of anything, since you’re _not_ , things have been really comfortable lately, better than you deserve, better than you can imagine asking for. He’s working on a new show, and you’ve been helping with the social media marketing, livetweeting the process, working the audience over text.

You’re actually kind of good at that? Surely your voice, especially typed-out, is quite distinctive, so some people must guess that the executor of the RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH official Twitter is you, but it’s not your face or ass on the thing, just your tippy-tapping forefingers and your ideas for how to get people jazzed up about the premise.

Dirk has really done a lot of the baseline work with Deific Beats, after all, in terms of making ‘Gods and less supernaturally powerful celebrities, rapping _very_ poorly’ a viable business model, with no small amount of help from Dave, who loves nothing more than nonsensical sing-talking. Branching off into robot construction and broadcast demolition is emphatically within his wheelhouse, and turning the thing on its head, making it a little less saccharine-sincere and a little more bracing and ironic, is similarly a logical development. 

The whole shebang isn’t just right up his alley, it’s sating an unmet need for a specific brand of satire that he’s created in the first place. It’s wandered so far up into that proverbial city of his particular talents and predilections that the poor concept will have no hope of arriving at its destination without stopping and asking directions.

And you have some skills in social media management yourself. He said as much, that even if you were some tragically underpaid intern your posts would probably be getting just as much mileage. It’s not too unlike the cringeworthy-yet-effective trolling you used to get up to on the TV Tropes forums. He loves the faux-rivalry angle you workshopped with him, the utter frothing lather it gets the fans into, picking sides and turning your relationship into something speculative, competitive, consumable. ‘Fujoshis gonna fujo’, he said gravely, then very nearly cracked a genuine smile.

Once, he laughed at one of your morning posts. You heard him snort at his phone over a cup of hot milk that might have once had the word ‘coffee’ whispered to it, and when you made grabby-hands over the table, it was your poll for the name of the show. He laughed. That is an enormous fucking deal. You told the story to Jade at least three times, and she agreed that it was really, really big for the two of you.

While you spent the whole outing trying not to make the topic too much ‘your remarkably happy relationship’, said relationship being the reason you haven’t hardly been out with her at all, since your birthday, at least not clubbing-wise, even though you’re both _fully legal_ , now… it’s a challenge, since it’s so much of what you think about, a part of everything good in your life.

There’s still other stuff to talk about. The show, your assorted friends, your mutual reread of Island of the Blue Dolphins and the liking you’ve taken to a troll survivalist youtuber, a ceruleanblood named Lesath something-or-other who can accomplish incredible feats in subzero temperatures and who runs a brilliant webshow about his exploits. Troll biology is so damn fascinating, and Jade knows all about the most cutting-edge developments in health and medical research that have been cropping up through interspecies collaboration.

It’s sort of a mystery to you why you used to, up until quite recently, think Earth C was shitty and boring. There’s a lot more to do, you suppose, when you wake up at seven, along with Dirk’s alarm, and both the first and last thing you do each day involve kissing him. When you’re bored, you just go bother him, and there’s always something to be done that doesn’t involve a bottle of anything but sometimes lubricant. Heh. 

You’re not really _sober_ -sober, since you do like a glass of the cheap stuff now and then, but it’s just over dinner, and not every time, and only what you need to settle your overactive nerves, on occasion. You do _tell_ people you’re sober, now, but only as a means of turning down proffered beverages, which is the most acceptable and responsible white lie there is.

People who actually know you are aware that you aren’t, so it’s not like you’re hiding anything. You and Jade split a bottle of bank-breakingly expensive bourbon over the course of your hiking trip, slow and steady, and the fact that the stuff is utterly disgusting really helps you keep a tight leash on yourself.

Everything is very good. Literally, every single aspect of every single thing. There would be a lot at stake, if anything _was_ at stake, which it isn’t.

Probably.

Guh. You stop staring out the window like some kind of forlorn little puppy dog, take your phone out again, and resume your review of the tweets posted from your account for the past two weeks. Dirk subcontracted the assignment out to some media company, and they seem to have done a decent job. Your engagement numbers are down, though. That’s the problem with the two of you being off-duty at once; no fresh photos to drive traffic.

Online audiences sure do love pictures. The fewer words, you have learned, the better.

It makes you frown a little, reading someone else’s efforts to match your voice. In theory, it ought to be flattering that someone would even try, but all you can find are turns of phrase you would hardly ever use, certainly not in _that order_ , practically leaping off the screen.

All that aside, it’s nice just to be in air conditioning, freshly showered, dressed in clean clothes with your heap of well-used t-shirts and hiking shorts tumbling in the laundryrobot closetjail next to the bathroom. 

You feel less grimey and more like a presentable human being than you have in a long time, which is a double-edged sword, because it was kind of a relief to just be a disgusting creature of the mud and wilderness for a while, and now that you _are_ presentable, you are kind of itching to, well, be presented to someone?

And you know that is a little crazy of you, a fucked up relic of a kind of crazy you _definitely_ aren’t anymore, you’re better, now. There is nothing inherently wrong with being appreciable and not actively appreciated, being fuckable and not being fucked, but you wish Dirk would hurry up and get home already. 

It’s a strange trade-off, him for the whole rest of the world. Not an unfair one, you don’t think, because it feels different, coming from him, sweet without being cloying, closer to real sugar as opposed to aspartame. You could get fat off his love and his love alone, swim in it, deeper and broader and more sparkling-blue than every other puddle you’ve dipped your toe in.

That’s all settled, rendered crystal-cut and glassy-clear, by the fact that, after two weeks, you miss him badly, and that is the core of all of your nonsense. It’s taken you long enough to come to that conclusion, but now that you’re here, it’s completely self-evident. You’re being ridiculous because you miss him.

What an utter hoot!

This is the first time you haven’t been _with_ him, in some capacity, for longer than a day or two, since you got together formal-wise back in December, all gross and histrionic on his living room floor, bluh bluh I’m Jake and I have a serious problem and everything is awful, please fix it for me, Dirk, bluh. You were making a big deal out of nothing, you know that, now, because if it was a big deal on its own, how come you’ve entirely put it out of your mind since you’ve been together?

You expected it to be strange and new, the raw and uncensored Jake And Dirk Are Dating Now production, even having dated him before. You’re different than you were. Very, very different, and sadder and older and less inclined to glow with pure hope at the drop of a hat. He’s different, too.

Different, sure, you saw it coming from a mile away, but you weren’t expecting to be daydreaming about him by day five in his absence.

You sort of thought you’d just be relieved, the way you usually have been on these little sojourns into the deep woods with Jade. That it would be you and her, ties to difficult situations cut, no obligations and nothing to worry about but the stack of texts that might be waiting whenever you decided to come back.

That is not how it has borne out, and your stomach is all aflutter with the thought that he’s been having experiences and fun conversations and he’s been off… changing and learning stuff without you, and you want to just crack his skull open and see what it looks like. And have him all to yourself for a bit. Just a bit. And also haul him bodily into your arms and crush his body to yours and envelope him like an amoeba. A whole lot of dumb overwrought flowery romantic stuff like that.

Does he feel like this about you? You think feeling this way for more than a few hours at a time would probably kill a man, so you hope not, and you throw your body down on his-slash-your green corduroy couch and sigh melodramatically, imagining that it is a delicate little fainting chaise lounge and you are a delicate little creature in a fine corseted gown instead of six and a half feet tall and still growing about a centimeter every year, somehow.

When Jade went to the doctor for the first time, you tagged along with. It was supposed to be as moral support, but the physician who saw the both of you was very taken with your respective Godly abnormalities, and you wound up swept into the fervor.

You know from experience that Janey heals with impossible speed and thoroughness, that a burn to her thumb when taking a tray of cookies from the oven is liable to be gone before she even has a chance to run it under the tap. Jade, it turns out, breaks needles with her skin, unless she concentrates very hard on allowing the phlebotomist to take her blood.

When it’s your turn for the needle, you’re half expecting the same to be true for you. It goes in just fine! But as you always have, you scar near-instantaneously, fast and messy, the tissue color-shifting from purple to brown, though no less gnarled, inside of a few seconds. And it still stings, too, because you haven’t _healed_ , your body has just taken the opportunity to do some tissue-regrowth without actually _helping_ you in any way. You can walk on a bad injury without fucking it up further, you’ve learned, but it will still hurt like the dickens until Jane has her way with it.

This is how you find out about all of your broken bones, which show up on an x-ray like you might have been recently beaten to death, knit chaotically together so your skull is practically a twenty-piece puzzle, though your MRI comes back normalish and you politely decline further testing. And Jade has no evidence of breaks at all, when the x-rays can even reach her oddly amorphous skeleton. Somehow, physically, at least, she made it out of SBURB completely unscathed. Just decidedly more canid, even on the inside-level.

She was quiet about it on the way home. You’re not sure she ever told anyone else in your friend group. It’s none of your business, until she decides it is, so after trying to broach the subject once, you decided to give forgetting it a try. She’s mentioned, in the past, that she works certain things out better by thinking them through on her own.

For your part, you were relieved for an explanation to the ongoing growing pains. The doctor predicted you’d finish up by twenty-five, which is five more long years of calf-twinges. You’re just happy to have an end in sight.

But there’s nothing very classically delicate about you, or about anyone in your ectofamily. So you have to pretend. Fainting couch. Flouncy Victorian lady. A handsome gentleman on his way to offer you some smelling salts and then kiss you silly.

You check three separate social media platforms again, fire off a pithy tweet about fantasy being the architect of reality, ending with a flippant solicitation for followers to announce their ‘hopes’ for the first season of RUMBLE IN DA PUMPKIN PATCH, then log off immediately.

It will get dark soon. Maybe you should order food. Thinking these thoughts, you doze off a bit; Jade is even more of an early riser than Dirk, and you’ve been exerting yourself an awful lot more than usual for the last two weeks, haven’t you?

His knock on the window wakes you up.

The sun is still peeking over the horizon sufficiently to silhouette him and everything in his arms, making it clear that he hasn’t the free hands to get the thing open on his own. His duffel is slung over one shoulder and a bag of takeout hangs from the fist not rapping at the dusty glass.

Your brief flirtation with unconsciousness has done nothing to get your heart out of your throat, and you can feel yourself smiling stupidly, involuntarily, as you hover up off the couch, right yourself into a standing position, and hurry over to swing the thing open and allow him entry.

He smells like he just rolled in a field of roses, practically _wafting_ into the apartment, and he must see your expression of surprise as you inhale, because the corner of his mouth twitches.

“Four consecutive spa days to end the Mandatory Strilonde Summit Proceedings. They held me at swordpoint and forced me to relax. I don’t know why I said ‘they’, actually, it was Dave. I’ve been depilated and massaged and fragranced within an inch of my life. If there’s any unperfumed skin left on my body, someone fucked up. Sorry, bro.”

“I’m glad you… er, that sounds like a real barrel of laughs! And the scent is very different,” you note. Dirk does not do different things often, and it’s hard not to notice when he does. A real creature of habit. “Let me get that for - you didn’t get Thai, did you? How - oh, _Dirk_ , that’s splendid!”

“Yep. Lemon Lotus.”

“Golly, but I could kiss you,” you say, marvelling at the bag of foodstuffs as you cart it over to the kitchen. That takes a trip to the Human Kingdom. Even by flight, that’s an hour each way.

“Still your favorite, right? Crunchy noodle pad thai, no green onions, no peanuts.”

“Right,” you say, blinking like a deer in the headlights. Forget kissing him (except don’t, ever), you could melt into a puddle on the spot. “Exactly right.”

“It’s not a hard order. C’mon, don’t tell me you’re starving to death, did you and Jade bring down a few bucks for dinner or what?”

“Not exactly,” you laugh.

You hate hunting. Yes, you fronted quite the opposite posture to your online friends for quite some time, thinking it ought to be something you did, thinking that enjoying the massacre of innocent creatures was more palatable than callously killing them for sustenance despite knowing better.

But Jade, in her brilliant utilization of her post-SBURB-y powers, can shrink a whole lot of delicious foodstuffs all small and portable to embiggen when it comes time to eat. She’s been provisioning every trip this way since the first year after your collective victory, but back then you had the strangest concern that Dirk might be jealous if you were to go on too much about what you’d gotten up to, so you suppose you never got around to explaining many of the mechanical details of your annual Tromp Around In The Woodsapalooza.

There are so many things you haven’t gotten around to telling him yet, and the prospect of sharing things, for the first time, excites you rather than winding your gut into a heavy, gelatinous knot.

As you explain, you take out silverware and napkins, and he makes all the right sounds of interest and agreement as you prattle about Jade’s brilliance and share one or two of her more PG stories about her exploits, most recently in the Troll Kingdom. She’s got a new honorary degree, and with it, loads of cool updates on that and various other sciencey subjects.

It does make you wonder, knowing this permutation of Jade and how happy she is to be a part of things, putting down roots and making friends everywhere she goes, how your gran actually felt about dying alone on an island, thousands of miles from anyone she cared about save for a little seven-year-old ingrate. While you were growing up, you figured it was a relief for her, solitude, that she must have done it by choice.

Now, you’re not so sure.

Dirk surely picks up some of this from your digression-laden monologue, but you’ll probably bring it up some other time, just to try to sort through it with him. One of his interests, of late, has been poring over paradoxically acquired literature on all of your ancestors, the means by which they fought their noble rebellion and the means by which they failed and Earth was subjugated for it. He’s a real history buff, and it’s yielded some interesting insights already.

For his part, he has his own stories. This is the first time the Strilondes have really held such a gathering, and the combination of Dave and Rose planning the thing sounds like perhaps the funniest thing you can imagine. Dave bought out an entire luxury resort on the beach for the fortnight, and he and Rose collectively put together the aforementioned minute-by-minute schedule to Maximize Fun.

That does sound a lot like something Dirk would do, and you cut in here to mention it, and he does his little exhale-but-actually-it’s-a-laugh and oh god you love him.

“They’re related to you, huh?” you suggest.

“They’re so fucking related to me. God help them.”

The scheduling, as he explains, did not prove to be as agonizing as he expected. They did bizarrely normal Hollywood family-reunion type things. He learned to wakeboard. Rose insisted that Dave would weep like a wretched, forlorn little wastrel if he refused, and did he want to make Dave cry? He did not. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, not totally unlike hoverboarding, just damper and modestly higher risk of being run over by a speedboat.

You cut him off again, with your mouth full of noodles, to note with great delight that he’s acquired tan lines, made visible when his tank top shifts on his shoulders.

In answer, he takes off his shades. Faint shadows, as though cast by the aforementioned sunglasses, are burnt into his face. There’s a ruddy red-brown flush to the skin stretched across his cheeks that hasn’t been spared by the dark lenses. You nearly choke on your dinner trying not to laugh.

“Come on. I can take it,” he says flatly. “You think I haven’t gotten worse from literally my entire family, constantly, over the course of several days? Let me have it.”

You do not let him have it. You beam at him over the table, pressing your lips together so you don’t say anything stupid. It wouldn't be an insult, either, that’s hardly what’s coming to mind.

“What?” he complains, crossing his arms over his chest a bit defensively. “You can’t say anything I haven’t heard. You’ve met Rose, right? I think she broke out a geometry textbook to better lean into the ‘triangles’ thing. It was genuinely impressive. You think the fucking _sun_ roasted me, that shit has nothing on my ectodaughter. I’ve literally never been so proud.”

“I love you,” you say, and he shuts right up, his glasses sitting, forgotten, next to his dinner.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a sunburn kink,” he says, clearing his throat and looking away from you.

“Shut up, I was _thinking_ it, that’s all, and I figure that means I ought to say it, don’t you?”

He hesitates, and you frown.

“Would it be more comfortable for you if I _did_ have a sunburn kink?” you offer. “I can work on that. Sexual predilections, I’ve been thinking about it, they’re basically beliefs, right? That’s definitely the realm of belief. My strong suit, you know, or so people keep telling me, heh.”

“Nah, christ, it’s just - I missed you. It was really great to hang with everybody for a couple of weeks, but I legitimately did miss you.”

“Aw,” you say, feeling glowy and pleased with yourself. “Fewer interruptions in the shower, I’d imagine.”

“Jake, these fucking showers,” he begins, and then launches off on a description of, to hear him tell it, utter water-pressure, space, and construction material shower nirvana. “But my dipshit ectoson practically broke down the door to haul me out every time I missed a vital picnic on a vacated golf course or whatever the fuck, so I didn’t really get to soak for longer than a few hours.”

“Poor thing,” you laugh. “Your suffering is incalculable.”

“I endure hell for this family.”

“You absolutely do. And no one appreciates you remotely enough for it.”

“It’s so hard, being canonized as a consecrated fucking martyr all the time, twenty-four-seven, miracles and prayers and getting erotically beheaded in Earth C classical art like a somehow-even-twinkier Saint Sebastian.”

“And nobody understands,” you agree, very gravely.

While you’d never go alone, at one point, Jade brought you along to see an Earth C art museum. You were utterly speechless. Of course Jade would like it, since all of her imagery is very divine-mother huntress, she’s been clearly assigned Artemis in your pantheon of fuckery, gorgeous, larger-than-life paintings of her running through dark woods, slavering hounds with eyes full of devotion alongside her, stars hanging overhead, a halo of moonlight in her hair.

For your part, you get a chariot of light and the skulls of slain monsters beneath your feet, a few battle scenes depicting a triumph over Lord English that you’re not entirely sure, well, _happened_. Not quite tentacles, as a motif, since perhaps no one explained the monstrousness of Hope to any of these artists, but pure radiance, yellow-white sunshine. It’s fine to look at, but makes your stomach turn the way a facetuned photo of yourself does, not-quite-rightness crawling under your skin.

But Dirk. Poor Dirk. Someone seems to have given Earth C the impression of him as a lissom, delicate little daisy of a man. One room has - you _count_ \- twenty-one different paintings in varying styles of him either getting his head chopped off or just being headless and dead, you know, in a sexy boycorpse way, ech.

And that’s not all, either, since the other most common portrayal involves him being wept over by Dave, all pieta-plagiarism in the fellow’s arms, and frankly, it’s clear that reality had no bearing on any of the portraits, because. Well.

Dave may be almost - _almost_ \- as tall as you, as close as anyone but Jade, but he’s built like a sickly hardware store tomato plant, no offense to the fellow. No one would accuse Dirk of being anything but barely average height, but he is a damn sight more muscular than his ecto-whatever. Graceful, yes, a fencer or a dancer rather than a weightlifter, but he’s been known to give you a run for your money at arm wrestling. Whereas you’d worry, if the situation ever came up, that you might snap Dave in half like a piece of raw spaghetti.

No offense. Never offense. But it’s rather hilarious, how the paintings deck him out in the skin of a slain wolf (did he ever slay a wolf? You really don’t think he did. Maybe he got killed by a few dogs one time, but that doesn’t count! Symbolism is such bullshit.) and classic-hero-musculature that wouldn’t look out of place in the 1980s run of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, cradling either his sylphlike brother’s head, body, or both like he’s auditioning for fucking Hamlet, alas poor Yorick indeed.

Dave didn’t _do_ that, that never happened.

You did that. That is called identity theft and it is illegal, even on Earth C, thank you very much.

Poor Dirk. You’re half-convinced that’s why he so immediately started brewing up television ideas, to set the record straight. He’s ‘not a twink, god fucking damn it, and not a natural blond, where the everloving fuck did they get that from, and why the shit is everyone so balls-to-the-wall weird about Dave?’

It’s mostly a joke among you all these days, but still just the slightest bit of a sore spot.

He continues to sip at his soup, and you try not to bolt down the rest of your dinner too quickly. It’s a real job, though, because you love this stuff. It’s got absolutely little to no relation to any actual Thai food, Dirk is not shy about letting you know, Earth C’s take being a flanderization of a flanderization of a 1900s foray into intercultural ambassadorship. But you’re just happy to be with him, enjoying your weird sweet fried noodles.

“You’re making a face,” he observes, setting down his spoon.

“Difficult to avoid, what with all this flesh and skin and cartilage stacked on top of my skull, but if it offends you…” you say with a grin, dabbing at your mouth with your napkin and trailing off.

“Fuck you. You know what I mean.”

“It’s just… I can’t remember the last time I felt so at peace, I guess. It was such a lovely jaunt with Jade, and instead of being all torn up about coming home, I feel even better, now. It’s actually been a real while and a half since I felt… bad, you know? Like actually bad.”

And you don’t have much in the way of emotional permanence about that sort of thing. Surely it was months ago, when you were staring gloomily at the bottoms of bottles like the world’s most up-his-own-ass useless overdramatic dilettante. Did it even really happen, if it all, in hindsight, just seems like a dumb pantomime of misery to get attention? A successful dumb pantomime of misery to get attention, mind you, you definitely got it, and a boyfriend to boot. Was it ever really as atrocious and apocalyptic and unsurvivable as it seemed?

Probably not. So you should remember that, just in case you ever feel like that again. It’s a temporary state, one that can vanish easily into the ether if you do an about-face and piece yourself together. And Dirk is the pharmakon. Always has been, always will be. There will never not be a remedy with him.

You watch him happily over your mostly-finished carton of takeout as he sips thoughtfully at his tom kha. You appreciate that more often than you’re annoyed by it, how he really tries to have the right words for you when you need them.

“I mean, I’m shit at this kind of conversation, full disclosure,” he says. You definitely already knew that. Your expectations have been adjusted accordingly. “But uh. Would it be shitty to say ‘thank fuck’? I feel the same way, I think. This is… good, right? We’re doing this right.”

“I think that would actually be a pretty fair assessment,” you sigh. “Ah, all the same, since I know I’m no great shakes at the ol’ talky-feelings-share-y business myself. Might as well be straight-up about it. I love you very much, and I missed you while I was away, and you were also away, and I am glad to be with you. And I’m grateful for. Everything.”

It’s a big unspoken ‘everything’, but it doesn’t really need describing. His forgiveness and his attention and his ongoing effort to be what you need, and yours to be what he needs, and the fact that this appears to be enough for both of you.

A lot of little stuff sort of has to get lumped together to really be comprehended. Moments of patience when you would have expected him to snap at you for being slow or hesitant at something, moments of sincerity where you would have expected a deadpan one-liner, his holding his tongue when something dumb happens in a movie you picked, his saying ‘sure’ without hesitation when you want to fly off to hang out with Jade at one in the morning, because she’s got to pull an all-nighter to finish some paper or build project and could use a little Hope upper and some company to make it more pleasant. And he’s okay with that, even knowing what you and Jade used to get up to when you hit the town. He trusts you, at least a little.

“I love you,” he says, and like always, his posture relaxes into the phrase. It means he wants you, of course, but it also means he cares for you, feels cared for by you, _believes_ in a version of you worth the wanting and the caring and the being-cared.

And you can instantiate that. You can, you can, you can. You can be that version of yourself, not the shitty other one, and _only_ that version.

“Are you just about done?” you ask, inclining your face to indicate his meal. “When I say I’ve missed you, I mean…”

“You gonna come up with an insane euphemism for pounding me into the mattress or should I?” he suggests, pushing the bowl to the side.

You laugh aloud, delighted. “I’m sorry, do you have a problem with my insane euphemisms? Are you not up to indulge in a little bodily commixtion?”

“Hey, that’s a pretty tolerable one.”

“I’ll have to work harder at it.”

“Please don’t.”

“Squat thrusts in the pumpkin patch. Formally introducing our toes to each other. A touch of horizontal venerous doddle-snerpery.”

“You made every word of that last one up. I’m actually sleeping on Rose’s couch tonight, goodbye.”

“Venerous is a real word!” you insist. “I probably pronounced it wrong, but that’s god’s honest, Dirk, you ought not to doubt me on these matters.”

“I always forget,” he sighs. “You’ve got a dictionary up there.”

“Oh, that’s good fodder for a - yes! Perusing the dick-tionary!”

This finally renders him speechless, lips parted around no sound in particular. You smile very, very smugly. He blinks a few times, closes his mouth, shakes his head.

“Nope, _somehow_ still in love with you. At this point, I might as well give up the ghost. If that doesn’t snap me out of it, nothing will.”

“Good. You’re mine forever,” you remind him, taking the silverware over to the dishwasher, tossing the takeout containers in the sink to soak and be recycled. If he can be considerate enough to get you food, you can certainly be considerate enough to clean up afterwards.

Rinsing off your hands, you take a moment to swish a little water in your mouth, and then to drink some more from the tap. It is such a wild luxury to have running water inside of a house, after years and years without. You still get excited about it. Dirk has mostly nudged you out of the habit of actually sticking your face under the faucet, but that’s just because he’s a weird stickler for ‘rules’ and ‘cups’.

He sighs in exasperation from the table, but doesn’t say anything. Probably because you’ve so chivalrously cleared away dinner.

You lean against the countertop, drying your hands on a towel and re-hanging it over the sink.

“So. Two weeks,” you say, conversationally. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Is that a joke?” he snorts. “Dude. I could get off to you carving me up like a jack-o-lantern, come on, I’m not picky.”

You bite your tongue a bit, here. Dirk is very evasive about Talking About Sex Things With You, still. After, what, going on four months of being Together? What he is willing to cop to being interested in doing is a fairly limited playbook, and not at all an unpleasant one.

Here is how that typically works. You catch him as he’s putting dishes away, or he finds you after emerging from the shower, or any of a dozen other ways of two people who want to fuck each other winding up in fucking distance. You kiss each other in some delightful configuration or another. He is a stellar kissing-partner-in-crime. This part never lasts long enough for your liking, largely because you could kiss him all day with one or two breaks and simply not get bored of it. It’s fun, it’s simple to pause when he has a pithy observation or you have a funny thought occur to you, and he laughs easier when he’s underneath you.

Invariably, at some point, you’re both too into it to keep clothing attached to your bodies, and you say something stilted and awkward like ‘er, do you - if you want, would you roll over a bit’ or ‘d’you want to take this to your room?’ or ‘the counter, I mean, this isn’t uncomfortable, is it?’ or else he grits his teeth a moment before muttering out a ‘would you - if you’re down, fuck, come on, Jake, don’t make me beg’.

Garments are removed, some slot B or another is carefully prepared for an appointment with a tab A, and you, to use his words, pound him into the mattress. Or the couch, or the countertop. You do it harder when he says ‘harder’, and kiss him when his mouth is within range, and try to find helpful words to add to the experience, but overall, the whole thing runs on a desperate, exploratory, tentative-but-absolute need for each other.

That’s all well and good, especially for you, since it keeps you from getting into your own head about stuff. Sort of. At least in the moment. You don’t really talk about it, and when you try to get started on the subject, inevitably either you make cagey jokes or Dirk makes cagey jokes until the conversation stops.

Healthy and normal as that is, or at least, you assume it is, there is the niggling certainty in the back of your mind that you could be doing better by him. That this is more the domain of teenage inexperience, that you know perfectly well that this isn’t the only way to do things. 

At the same time, couples in movies never talk about it, either, so that is a compelling check mark in the ‘never ever talking about it’ column. It’s just, there’s other stuff you want to do to him, most of which you are dead certain he would enjoy. And that might open a door, mightn’t it? A tempting door. You really believe it could be better, though this is already as good as you’ve ever had it.

“Is that a yes on the cutting me up like a fish?” he adds, and you suppose you have probably been staring, brow furrowed, at some point in the middle distance for a little too long.

“Criminy, Dirk,” you say, a flush warming your cheeks. “Methinks the gentleman doth suggest vivisection as foreplay too much!”

“Okay, so that’s a no,” he says agreeably, leaning back in his chair.

“Not a no,” you grumble. “Assuming you’re serious, but - but look, don’t you think that’s a little too much of a…”

“Wait, wait, wait. Hold the fucking phone. ‘Not a no’. Jake. Dude.”

“There are a lot of things that I wouldn’t say no to!” you insist, sniffing imperiously, which at least slows his roll a little. “As I was _saying_ , Dirk, don’t you think that’s a little like switching from teetering across a slackline to driving a unicycle across a tightrope suspended over the grand canyon? An eensy weensy bit of an insane escalation before we’ve even exchanged two words on the subject?”

“I’d be into gettin’ dissected,” he says, faux-offhandedly. He hasn’t put his shades back on, so the curiosity gleams, dark and unignorable, in his golden-brown eyes.

“Fine, fine, and I’d be into dissecting you, in theory, but in practice is very different!” you say, raking a hand through your hair and pacing a bit in the small kitchen. “There are so many considerations! Dropcloths, and… and plastic, like in Dexter.”

“Are you Dexter in this scenario?”

“No, it’s not a roleplay! Oh, come off it, Dirk, how are you so good at derailing this stuff?” you complain. “I have never been less turned on than I am right now, for your friggin’ information.”

“My bad. Should I act more corpsey?”

“ _Dirk_!”

“Sorry. Look, go ahead, I’ll shut the fuck up. You want to have a sex talk, we’ll have the sexiest sex talk anyone ever had. Easy.”

“Doesn’t seem easy so far,” you groan. Your eartips must be positively beet-red, and your face can’t be far behind. “Ah, and you made me lose track of my… I had a point.”

He mimes putting a hand over his own mouth, and you snort out a reluctant laugh.

“We haven’t really discussed, or even broached the issue of… you know, what’s okay and what isn’t okay. And that’s fine, since we seem to do alright on autopilot, but… don’t you think we ought to hash it out a little? It could be fun.”

“Anything you want, any hole you want, any time. Bam. Boundaries set.”

“Lands sakes alive, that is far too much - Dirk, really, just think for a second, don’t you imagine I could make a misstep, and it could be unpleasant for you, and that would ruin everything, if you didn’t have a clear way to say so?”

“I don’t traumatize easily.”

“That is a bare-faced lie.”

“Okay, yeah, but the scope of what it would take to traumatize me _more than I’ve already been traumatized_ is incomprehensible and unachievable, even for you,” he parries.

You sigh, very loudly. He is critically underestimating you, somehow. Or else you know him better than he knows himself. Because there are a million things you could say, at literally any moment, that would kill him. Actually kill him. You could start talking, without a filter, and go down the wrong rabbit hole, say the wrong truth, and he would never recover from it. You are certain of this.

It’s possible that you could hurt him more than anyone else in the universe could. He’s let you in too often, showed you too much of himself. The soft pieces, delicate and eminently squishable beneath a careless shoe.

That’s not what he’s talking about, now. He’s talking about - about rough or scary or _weird_ sex things. And fine, sure, but isn’t there some bad truth to be found in that? If he digs too deeply into the implications of ‘I like the idea of doing stuff to you that puts you in my absolute control’ or ‘I like the idea of doing stuff to you that might hurt you, just because I know you wouldn’t stop me, and you’d convince yourself you liked it’, well, wouldn’t he find some of those devastating, world-ending truths buried in there?

That for all you trust him, there’s a part of you that never will. That doesn’t trust anybody. That just wants, so friggin’ badly, for things to go exactly the way you tell them to go. For people to stop _using_ you, and to maybe a little use _them_ for a change. Which is just plain evil, for starters, evilbad in all respects and not something to expose Dirk to, until things in the relationship are a little more… until you’re sure he won’t leave you over it.

Or never, you know what? Never is good, too.

Things are so good right now. You love him. Could anyone understand how strange it is to say those words and mean them in every sense? How much you rely on him, how vulnerable that makes you? As sure as you could say the wrong thing and shatter the strand of glass connecting you, and him with it, he could do the same thing to you.

When it’s a different person every time, it doesn’t matter as much if they hurt you, because it’s temporary, because _they_ don’t matter or anything, just brief stopgaps between feeling worthless and whatever.

You don’t even remember what it feels like to feel that way, actually. That version of you might as well have been a dream. It feels like one, anyway. All you know for certain is Dirk, right here, right now, who matters so all-consumingly.

“Get up, then,” you tell him. “Let’s go ahead and - and do this.”

“Right here?” he asks, not a trace of hesitation.

“No,” you sputter. “I mean, your room, just -”

He’s already up and on his way. You gather yourself up, put the pieces of what should happen next in order, like a puzzle, and follow him into his bedroom.

It looks a lot like the habitation you used to see in the background of selfies and videochats, actually, though also very different. The bed is proper full-sized, up on concrete blocks, despite your nudging at him to buy a real bedframe, since he can certainly afford it. The posters on the walls are the same, just framed, now, rather than pasted up haphazardly. His desk is in the living room, so it’s really just the bed, a bedside table, an enviable flatscreen television, and him. Sitting on the edge of the duvet, still without his sunglasses, looking mostly nonplussed.

You straddle him, without another word, hold his body to yours, and kiss him deeply. He relaxes into it, the same way his posture changes when he says he loves you.

He still smells like fresh-cut flowers, more intense up close, and you almost laugh at the thought. It’s even more intense at the crux of his throat and his jaw, where you kiss him next. His hand, when you reach down to catch it as he circles his arm around your waist, feels soft and manicured. You and Jade should do a family spa day, that would be hysterical.

Compared to him, at the moment, despite being showered up, you feel rough and clumsy and ungainly. His face is smooth and moisturized, too. All the edges filed off him.

“I missed you,” you say, for the severalth time, back to his lovely mouth, kissing him again, and again, but just careful pecks. “I love you so much. I love being with you.”

“Is this the outrageously traumatic menu item you were so flipped out about putting on the table?” he asks, his voice gone all low and husky already. “Because you’re right, this is fucked up, dude. I don’t know if I’ll recover.”

Then he gets his hand on your ass and goes back to kissing you. You laugh against his mouth.

“Not quite,” you concede. “And I don’t want to do anything fucked up tonight.”

“Hell yeah, vanilla city, count me in.”

“You’re worse than I am when it comes to just - agreeing to everything,” you sigh.

“No,” he says. “I’m really not.”

That pulls you up short for a second, but you have your mouth on his before you have to think about it for too long. His lips are soft and supple. It’s wet and hot, but not too wet, all the action happening at the front of the mouth, where it’s supposed to be, both of you being deliberate about it.

“It’s not,” you say, breaking away for a second as you grapple with the hem of his tank top. His lips chase yours, find your jaw and then your neck. “Not exactly… vanilla, either, I don’t think. Different.”

Maybe it is? Your perception of this sort of thing is fucked to hell and back. Your words don’t mean the same thing as anyone else’s words on the subject, and that is where the essential breakdown in communication tends to take place.

You slide the shirt up to his wrists, exposing his bare chest, but stop there, twisting it around until it’s tight, but not too tight, knotting it in such a way that it will at least slightly restrain his hands. Not for very long, if he wasn’t cooperating, since he could probably shred the fabric even if the stretch wasn’t enough to slip away, but he holds still.

“Alright,” he notes. “I’ll give you this one. Different.”

“Not vanilla?”

“Just FYI, fucking my ass over a countertop isn’t exactly god-fearing vanilla missionary, either, so our goalposts are already looking a little funny flavor-wise.”

“Dirk,” you complain, not specifying the reason for your tone, he should _know_ , that’s classic Strider Evasion, trying to shock-and-or-bamboozle you into not pressing any further. “Is it _alright_?”

He tests the bonds, sits back a little, wriggling his hips away so he has more room to maneuver. You feel his hands, then his wrists. Warm, the same temperature on both sides.

“It’s good,” he says, more softly.

“Less intended as a restraint,” you explain, already feeling very awkward, and not even a little wishing that you’d had a glass of wine with dinner, because you are on your best behavior and you don’t need that. “More, I s’pose, a reminder. Don’t touch. I will be doing the touching.”

“Fuck. I do like touching, you got me there.”

At your gentle moving-him-around, he shifts to the very edge of the bed and lets you take his most strikingly hideous pair of cargo shorts off, as well. Clearly a relic of his vacation. He has the slightest graduation in the color of his legs, now, at the knee, and even in the lamplight, it’s a definite shift from dark brown to marginally less dark brown. A fucking cargo shorts tan. You hate him, actually.

“Eying up the gams, huh?”

“Planning to purchase some sunscreen on your behalf, o best beloved,” you sigh.

“Fuck off. My cargo shorts tan is sexy. You love cargo shorts.”

“There is a lot to unpack there,” you note. “Keep talking and we can sift some additional vanilla out of this ice cream when I gag you.”

“Hot,” he deadpans, but does shut up.

Mostly undressed, now, you lower him back across the bed, his arms over his head, still sort-of-bound, his body on full display, save for a pair of novelty briefs with pictures of hats printed on them.

“These are atrocious,” you note, with a slight smile.

“Funny way of saying ‘sexy as all hell’,” he grumps in reply. “Look, I know I said I could get off on basically anything you did, but that was hyperbole for dramatic effect. Staring at my clothed junk alone is probably not gonna do it. That’s a soft ‘probably’, I mean, there’s a first time for everything, and if it’s gonna be anyone, it’s gonna be you, but...”

“Try not to talk yourself into knots,” you suggest. “Don’t you think I have a plan?”

“Nope. Never.”

“You’re usually right, but not this time,” you chide him, climbing up onto the bed, straddling his hips once again. The truth is, you haven’t had cause or opportunity to really re-acquaint yourself with his body, or even - it’s not as though you got all that far back in on the rooftops of LOTAK. “I promised you touching. Do chillax, if such a thing is within your repertoire.”

He twists about under your scrutiny, his abs flexing, the slopes and curves of his body pulling in and relaxing. He has a beautiful body. Lithe and graceful and strong enough to snap bones, all at the same time. His dark skin gleams like satin in the low light from the lamp, the even lower light filtering in the window, sunset-colored.

“Is it alright if I - oh, how the devil does one go about saying this. Your chest.”

“My chest,” he agrees, less flippant than before. You recognize his forced-casual affect through the observable twitchiness of his gestures as well as the asynchrony of his tone. “Tits, boobs, pecs, s’all fine. But it’s a chest. Definitely not the first time you’ve seen my chest out, bro.”

Your face heats up involuntarily. He’s right, you have no reason to make a fuss if he’s not making a big deal out of it. You just worry that it might be a bigger _thing_ than he’s letting on, and you’ve been hesitant about touching him there at all, as a result. He bound all the time back in the game, and only rarely does so now, just when he’s doing his ‘serious actor/producer/writer/God!Dirk’ public appearance schtick, which is… often enough to notice. In your first stab at a relationship, you cut the gordian knot of not knowing how to ask by simply avoiding his chest altogether. After all, it would have been too complicated to get the wickedly tight garment off and then on quickly if trouble struck, or the girls showed up looking for company, or…

“I just meant to ask, more, about touching. Your chest. Is that something you’re cool with?”

“All kinds of cool.”

“And that’s not just something you’re saying? It seemed a bit of a tender place, back when - you know, the first time we were…”

“I was sixteen, dude. Still figuring my shit out, believe it or not, kind of the archetypal experience of being sixteen, not that you’d have any reason to understand or relate. You were fine then. Try to channel some of that being-fine energy now, I swear to fuck, it’s _cool_.”

“Right,” you laugh, a bit of the tension dispelled. “Right, yes. So, do you have any preferences, or..?”

“Jake,” he groans. “I’m dying. My preference involves hands on chest, immediately, ASA-fuckin-P. Your reservation is for fifteen minutes ago and the maitre d is getting fucking pissed.”

“Roger,” you say, leaning in to do as he asks, brushing a few tentative fingers over his nipple. When he tenses, his shoulders go taut and his whole chest shifts under your touch. You trace over him with the pad of your thumb. “So, er, how’s that?”

“Tickles like a motherfucker.”

“Whoops, sorry.”

“Not in a bad way. Just a _way_. Not gonna get me off like this, but it’s nice.”

“Tickles,” you say thoughtfully, bringing your other hand into the equation so you can poke clinically at both sides at the same time.

“Yeah, groundbreaking, I know. Anyway, is this the part where you get the electrodes out or something? Clamps, fuckin’ clothespins, kick it up a notch, I’m game as hell.”

He’s shivery at the stimulation, in a way that bolsters the credibility of his ‘ticklish’ explanation. You close your thumb and forefinger around the notably stiffened bud of dark skin dead-center to the thing, and give him an exploratory tug.

Dirk gasps and twitches.

“Tickles?” you repeat.

“Not exactly.”

“Good?”

“Is this a census? Fucking hell, yeah, easily four out of five hats.”

“There’s no need to be snippy,” you say, reproachfully, but recognizing that Dirk may not have the brainpower to spare to keep his tone in line, in this sort of situation. You stroke the curve of his pec soothingly, and his eyes briefly flutter closed, though the tension in his mouth doesn’t abate. “Don’t you think it’s for the best that we figure each other out a little, what feels good and what doesn’t, where the sensitive bits are?”

“You’re sitting on the sensitive bits,” he sighs. “Y’know, not to be too fucking honest or anything, but it’s a lot easier on my dignity when you’re smashing my face into a countertop and rawing me.”

“Is it?” you ask, sincerely a little surprised.

He opens his eyes to better furnish a half-sardonic, half-skeptical eyebrow-raised type expression.

“Yeah.”

“Is there… a reason?” you probe, hesitating, though you’re still mid-feeling-him-up, so it probably doesn’t come off quite so wide-eyed-Pollyanna as it sounds.

“Okay, this is definitely the weirdest thing we’ve ever done. Fine. We’re talking about it, I guess. Talking about stuff. With your hands on my tits, that’s a normal way to do that.”

“Would you prefer my hands _off_ your tits?”

He blinks.

“No. Keep it up.”

“Good.” You clear your throat. “Alright, let me… explain my rationale, here, if I may have the floor.”

“Be my guest. I’d make a sweeping bow of acquiescence, but my hands are tied over my head.”

“I don’t - I truly don’t have a problem with how we’ve been going about things,” you say, ignoring that comment. “Really, please don’t think for a second that I could ever, I’m not… I’m not _bored_ of anything. I got to thinking, while we were apart and all, about all the stuff I don’t know about you and wish I did.”

He gazes up at you in silence. The rosy-brown sunburn to his cheeks makes it look a little like he is blushing, but he isn’t. He’s just listening.

“Confound all of this, it’s really hard to explain,” you say. “I mean, without going off on dumb tangents that don’t even matter. I just, I actually care about you, you know that? And if the best way to show that involves, I don’t know, _anything_ , I don’t just want to guess at that, I want to _know_. I want to update the version of you that I’ve got in my brain. And then, sure, fine, if fucking on countertops is your preferred sort of love, I’d like to do that on purpose, not just because I was pawing at you while you were doing dishes like some kind of animal in heat, alright?”

“Damn,” he says, utterly deadpan. “Extremely romantic, bro.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, like you’re any better.”

“That’s fair. I’m definitely not. Okay, uh, kind of challenging to gather my thoughts, but I guess I’m with you on all that stuff.”

You redirect your attentions back to his nipples and he makes a little ‘mrrr’ noise in response, squirms again, his shoulders flexing into your touch, his back arching insistently.

“On purpose,” he finally agrees. “Yeah. I guess, all I’d want to… add, or modify, as it were, is that I like it when you. The idea that you want me, I mean. It probably sounds shitty and exploitative and whatever, but I’m being honest, right? The idea that you, sometimes, that you just… you're overcome with... that there's at least some part of you that just _wants_ me.”

His shoulder tugs up like he’s trying to make an emphatic gesture, though the tank top knot holds him back. He sighs.

“It’s kind of stupid. I know you care about me and shit, and there are a lot of totally reasonable ways of showing that, the vast majority of which don’t involve flipping me over and rawdogging me before we’ve even finished watching the Ghostbusters reboot where they’re all lowblood trolls because my ass is irresistible to you, no three-hour negotiation, no talking yourself into it, just...”

“That was a fun movie, for a reboot, I mean. I loved what they did with the whole burgundyblood ‘communion with the dead’ dealie,” you note, still reeling a little from the rest of it. “Shame we never found out how it ended.”

He cracks the barest hint of a smile.

“Go ahead, seriously. Look, the spirit of clinical inquiry is its own kind of hot, alright? Feel me up, Scotty. Set phasers to ‘grope’. I’m not fucking with you. Feels good, and it’ll feel better when you get to poking around my dick, and you’re right, we should communicate more, and that includes you. I’m happy to bite the bullet and sacrifice my oiled-up, nubile body to your sexy science-hands if there’s even a fucking minuscule chance it'll make you consider asking me for shit you actually want, or whatever.”

It’s taken a second and a half, but you snap out of your buzzing-hindbrain-blue-screen of death to laugh, shortly, and then stop in your tracks, your hands stilling completely.

“Dirk,” you say, “are you… are you somehow convinced that I want something other than just _you_?”

You can hear the pending lie in his hesitation, and you decide to put a stop to that right quick, on the double.

“Don’t say whatever nonsense you’re about to say,” you tell him brusquely. “I don’t want another word out of you unless it’s ‘stop’, d’you understand me? And quit squirming. You’re not in charge of this. I’m doing what I want, and to reiterate, I am not stopping until I hear a ‘stop’ or I am damn well _finished_.”

“Fuck,” he says, on an exhale, almost reverently.

“I thought I told you to _shut up_ ,” you remind him, gripping him by the jaw, not hard enough to hurt, but holding his head in place, so he has to look you in the eyes and see how serious you are.

He tries to nod. His chest shudders with the effort of stilling itself. Shifting your weight to your knees, readjusting your position on top of him, you get your lips back on his and kiss him, fiercely. It’s alright, for now, that he’s kissing you back.

Does he just not _believe you_ , when you say you love him?

You can fix that.

When you release him from the kiss, he tilts his chin up, inviting you down to the curve of his throat. You accept the offer, and while you don’t relax your grip, your hand now firmly anchoring him by the base of his skull, you’re gentler with the delicate skin over his trachea. This is one of those spots where bodies are more fragile, where a little goes a long way. You mouth at him languidly. All the time in the world to suck the unfamiliar scents of weird beauty products off his skin, make him yours again.

At the sternocleidomastoid muscle, where the skin is tougher and a layer of subcutaneous tissue protects him somewhat, you sink your teeth in.

He gasps like he’s been stabbed in the gut. You know what that sounds like, having made that sound yourself, before. You think. In one dream or another. A past that’s left a deep, ugly scar on your stomach that defies Jane’s attempts to heal it, because nothing is broken, because it’s somehow the natural state of your body. He tries, unsuccessfully, to swallow down that wounded, helpless exhale, but of course, you’re close enough to hear it, even through the meat of his throat.

You haven’t broken the skin, there’s no blood in your mouth, but from his reaction, you check, just in case. When you glance up, his eyes are closed, eyelashes fluttering.

His whole body has gone slack, the way he does when you kiss him and when he says he loves you.

Digging your teeth in harder, you suck a bruise into his skin as you do so, soothe it with your tongue, then move down a fraction of an inch and repeat the process.

He is no one’s but yours, only yours, and you _can_ be everything for him, and everything for yourself, at the same time. Damn the fucking contradiction straight to hell. You are the God of Hope, the avatar of pure, paradoxically instantiated unreality, fake-made-real, and you have never wanted anything to be real more than that.

Yours, yours, yours, always and forever he is yours.

You wonder if he can feel the heat of your certainty, the forge burning incandescent within your ribcage, hot enough to smith a fucking sun, a universe where what you believe is _true_.

Certainly, he can see you glowing.

“Stay put,” you tell him, your tone low, and you kiss down the hollow of his throat, find the ridge of his clavicle with your lips and suck. More delicate, stretched-taut skin. He shudders and you hold him tighter against it.

You follow his bones down the divot of his sternum. The curve of his breast is mostly muscle; you can feel it through your mouth when he tenses, the muscle of your tongue drawing the membrane-thin skin and muscle of his chest between your lips. Bruises form easily, here, hardly any pressure needed to turn his skin black and purple, to make him throw his shoulders back against his bonds and try, really try not to thrash about so.

“Stop that,” you tell him, breathing as heavily as he is, now. “Just take it, Dirk. Be good for me and _take it_.”

He moans rather salaciously, relaxing, bit by bit, with palpable effort.

“Very good,” you say, then close your mouth over his nipple. Soft and careful, not even an intimation of teeth. Flat-tongue, warm and wet, so you can hold yourself where you want to be, just sort of undulating rather than sucking.

All the tension snaps back into his body. You can feel his spine curve, his hips buck upwards, his skull slam back against the mattress. And he moans like it hurts, but presses his body up unerringly into the feeling, so you figure that’s not the case.

You let your body rock with his, teasing at him with your tonguetip at intervals, nudging up against him, tugging at him gently, never really sucking in earnest. It’s easy to get carried away, in your experience. People have certain ideas about what ought to feel good, and that, thus, _more_ ought to feel better, and that is just not always the case.

He doesn’t seem to mind your holding back a bit, his eyelashes no longer fluttering, each breath coming out in a needy pant, his arms flexing, clearly stretching the black fabric of his shirt, though the knots hold.

But he seems to be getting used to it, as you swap your ministrations to the other, replacing your mouth with your fingertips over the warm, slick flesh you leave behind and eliciting a sharp groan. He doesn’t jerk about hardly at all anymore. That’s good. He ought to be accustomed to being treated like this, you ought to do this all the time.

“Jake,” he chokes, when you pause, briefly, to put your lips on his abs, the expanse of belly-button-less skin and delicate little vellus hairs that turn darker and curlier down towards the waistband of his briefs. “Fuck me.”

You stop altogether, lift up your head.

“No,” you say.

“C’mon,” he pleads. “Need your dick, c’mon, just fuck me.”

This does prove a potent reminder of the altogether-too-many articles of clothing that are currently keeping said dick from doing anything but straining against the fabric of your boxers, but you have no intention of letting him make this about _you_ again, because it’s not.

“Shut _up_ ,” you remind him, stroking the inside of his thigh, the soft hair on his legs, tracing the enviable lines of his musculature. “You don’t tell me what to do, Dirk.”

“ _Please_ ,” he begs again, as you hook a finger around his waistband and tug his briefs down and away. “...wait, what?”

“Sh.”

He sits up, just slightly, his abs clenching in on themselves to try to get a look at what you’re doing.

“You don’t have to do that,” he says quietly. “Seriously, I can’t get off in a reasonable amount of time without - I’m not saying you can’t, I’m _definitely_ not doubting you, but it’ll go faster if you just finger me. Or you know. Fuck me.”

“If it’s a problem,” you say, stroking his hip reassuringly with your thumb, “you don’t have to explain.”

“Not a problem,” he sighs. “There’s no hangup, not really. You just. You don’t have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” you tell him. “I _want_ to suck your dick.”

That _is_ how he’s referred to it in the past. Frankly, you’ve never really had the occasion to _inspect_ his junk, you just know that the vast majority of humans have _something_ downstairs they’d have reason to like sucked, and what with the positioning that works for him, you have a fair idea of what you’re working with.

“Christ,” he groans.

“If you don’t come, I’ll fuck you until we both do,” you explain matter-of-factly. “And that’s that, unless you pump the brakes. But I do want to taste you, you understand? I love the way you taste. I want you in my mouth.”

He doesn’t reply, but he does relax his thighs enough to permit you to slide his briefs the rest of the way down and toss them aside.

“Very good,” you tell him, with a last kiss to his upper thigh. “Now hush up and spread your legs for me.”

There are easier ways to do this than with him laying supine in bed, you supporting yourself on your elbows, but you can try those another time. There will be plenty of other times, he’s _yours_ , and that’s one pivotal difference between him and everyone else. He is not borrowed or on loan for the night, he belongs to you.

He’s wet, and more than that, he’s _hard_. Having been on T for a few years, now, you suppose, he’s got some fairly impressive length going on, easily the size of your thumb to the first knuckle, pink and blood-flushed and pressing out of the darker skin of the hood gathered over him, the folds of his labia beneath.

You’re not interested in messing around with him any further. This is no longer a teasing operation. You lower your mouth over him, very carefully, not yet having calibrated yourself to his particular equipment. Everyone is different, after all. His thigh, held in place by your steady hand, gives a twitch in response, but you think he’s holding his breath.

The weight of him is pleasant on your tongue as you slowly begin to explore, to test what might feel good. He’s not quite as sensitive as you were expecting, throws back his head and groans, at last, at your first gentle application of suction, doesn’t jolt away in the slightest. Still sensitive, but you don’t need to handle him like porcelain. You suck a little harder, moving your tongue up the length of him as you do so, and he makes a stifled noise of anguished pleasure as his thighs try to clamp around your ears. It takes real strength to hold him in place.

“Like that,” he chokes. “Fuck. Feels - feels so good, _fuck_ , what the fuck.”

Did he just try to turn down his first blowjob? Poor man. You close your eyes and repeat the motion, minimizing the stress to your tongue, maximizing the warmth and wet and stimulation you’re delivering to his dick. It works better if your use your whole mouth, rather than just licking like a vapid neophyte who’s never sucked a dick-and-or-clit before. You can do the head-bob-y motion for longer than you can do fancy tongue tricks.

The handsome musculature of his lower body continues to seize and tighten around you, his ankles digging into your shoulders every time he full-body spasms in response to some particularly dead-on application of your lips or tongue, and that’s its own reward, the way he tries to draw you closer.

You did tell him not to talk, but he seems to have forgotten that completely. You can’t bring yourself to mind one bit, now that he’s not spouting self-deprecating nonsense. Just your name and a litany of curses, and that’s the sort of music anyone would pay good money to hear in concert.

When you find a particularly good rhythm, quick and regular, hard-but-not-too-hard, he helpfully lets you know that you’re on the right track by screaming, actually screaming, and you think it’s an awful good job that you don’t have neighbors, and are also located two hundred feet in the air.

He makes a real, sincere effort to crush your skull between his thighs, and if you were a watermelon, you would likely be a goner, but you aren’t. You put up just as much resistance as is necessary to hold him where he is, trembling violently, without letting up for a second. This is really not the time to be changing anything. He’s very close, and you wouldn’t want to wreck it for him.

You think he tries to say your name as he comes, but it tears out of his chest as just a deep, almost painful groan. Like you’ve punched him in the stomach instead of sucking him off for fifteen minutes. His muscles lock, and he’s shaking like a leaf beneath you, quivering helplessly, gone.

You carry him through it, letting him buck up into your mouth, against the wet resistance of your tongue, no longer sucking, but moving with him until he stills.

“God,” he breathes.

“One of them,” you agree cheerfully, releasing his thighs and drying your mouth on the back of your forearm. You wish you could have held him, like you do when you fuck him to completion. Well, easy enough to amend.

You hoist yourself up and settle in beside him. He rolls over into your arms immediately; you observe, as he does so, that he’s torn his tank top, and his hands are now free to grasp you by the shoulders and hold you close, though his grip is decidedly more lax than usual, his chest damp with sweat.

“Next time I’m sucking you off first,” he grumbles into your t-shirt. “I feel like jell-o. One of those weird shitty old fashioned pea-soup-and-mayonnaise flavored jell-os with hot dogs floating in it. My ass is about to get kicked out of the PTA potluck.”

“Next time?”

“Next time. Jesus fuck, you’re hard as a rock, dude, go ahead and bend me over. I don’t think I can feel anything below the waist, go to town.”

“Not the most arousing solicitation I’ve ever heard,” you note, kissing him on the side of the face. Tears have crusted on his cheeks. You think about licking them off.

“Hey, grade-A boneless boyfriend, right here. Offer of a lifetime. Pretend it’s Lara Croft’s pussy you’re wrecking, I literally could not give a shit about anything right now. I’m swimming in oxytocin. I’m as doped up as Lance motherfucking Armstrong, with even fewer testicles.”

“The bones are my favorite part,” you sigh, kissing him again. “And I don’t want to fuck Lara Croft, dearest, that would devastate our platonic friendship. You are completely incoherent.”

“I’m consenting.”

“Now there’s a phrase I like to hear. Roll over.” You reach up to the head of the bed to find a few pillows to bolster his hips, and he helps you pile them up to his liking as he settles on his stomach.

“Just go for it, I’m ready,” he says, a bit muffled by his duvet, trying and failing to wiggle his hips temptingly. Fortunately for him, he is always very tempting.

“Are you? I couldn’t tell,” you laugh, running your hand over the tight curve of his ass. He’s built like the letter V, proportionately broad shoulders, a muscular back that narrows to a tapered waist, and the butt of a much smaller man. Pocket-sized, and no amount of dedicated squatting seems to do much about it. You do adore his body.

He’s utterly soaked, when you feel him up a little. When you slot yourself in on top of him, you can mouth at the shell of his ear, which you enjoy quite a lot, and you prop his thighs open a bit and slide in, easy as you like. He sighs almost rapturously as you do so. You give his ear a nip, and he turns his face up to try to smile at you.

“Do you have a mouth thing?” he asks, as you’re kissing your way down his hairline in time with your slow thrusts. It feels good, being in him, _finally_ , warm and gratifying as slipping into a hot bath, but you’re not in a rush.

“Huh? I guess,” you say.

“Cool,” he says simply, then groans and tenses his shoulders. “There. S’a good angle.”

“Could you go a second time?” you suggest, agreeably holding your pacing and positioning as steady as you can, relishing the easy slide, the slow-building pleasure as you thrust shallowly into him rather than just trying to fuck your way to orgasm like you're late for an appointment. You like it when he talks to you.

“Maybe. Ahhhh - right there. Not deeper, but harder.”

“As you like it,” you agree, smiling against his curls as you feel him roll his hips up against the pillows, then back on your dick.

“Did you actually mean it, the dissection thing? Like, I can’t perma-die. I don’t think there’s a Heroic or Just way to die during sex, though if there is, I’ll definitely figure it out.”

“I…” you hesitate a little, in part with the exertion of both fucking him harder and modulating your thrusts so as not to go much deeper, in part because the slow waves of pleasure, as his body clenches and moves with yours, are turning your brain mushier than usual, and in part because you sincerely don’t know the right answer. “Well, yes. I did. Mean that. Not in a fucked-up way, though. Just in the normal - weird - ah, weird sex way.”

“Sick. Anything else percolating up there? Weird shit, Jake, I - mm, _right_ there, fuck, like that - I’m all about the weird shit,” he pants.

“Mm.” You snake an arm around his clavicles and pull him closer, and he yields like a doll made of meat, and alright, that’s a little hot, how he doesn’t object or resist for a second as you manhandle him. Which you can do any time you like, but not often without him twisting around and complaining like a cat that doesn’t like being picked up. “I’ll think about it. There’s got to be a way to work up to that sort of thing, hhh, gradually, you know?”

Dirk quietly hums his agreement, midway into the process of melting into a puddle beneath you.

“Are you falling asleep?” you ask fondly.

“Kink bingo. Somnophilia.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“No playful insults while your dick is in me. Call me a whore and backhand me across the face or sweet nothings in my ear. No in between.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” you sigh, craning your neck to kiss the base of his skull. 

Except for, like, the dissect-y thing, you suppose. You do _suppose_ there’s something in your brain that you don’t like much, but can’t exactly squash out of yourself, because it just _is_ you, at this point. Something that might not have gotten over all the times people and things and - and circumstances have kicked you down brutally and refused to let you stand before you were a bloody stain on the ground. Not even Dirk was always there when you needed - when you needed _someone_ , something, and that’s not a very sexy thought to be having, is it. It’s probably a ringing indictment of your character that the thought of… well, tapping into that, someday, the thought that he might let you figure it out, with him to practice on, it’s a… it’s not quite a boner killer.

You kiss him some more at the nape of his neck, and he sighs indulgently, continuing to roll his hips with you, even as you speed up a touch. For all his posturing, he is very much not asleep.

“Hold me,” he murmurs. “Tight.”

“Right-o,” you say, obligingly crushing his body to yours. He sighs, and then there isn’t much more room for clever comments by either of you. Because you’re getting awfully close to climax, after an _awfully_ long time sporting this particular hard-on, and he is trembling towards his own release.

You stroke his shoulder as you fuck him, press your lips gracelessly to his jaw, not kissing - more like mouthing, but you just want to be close to him.

All the other stuff can hang, for all you care. You could be happy with this. You could be happy with him, and stop being so stupid about everything. He would make you happy for the rest of your immortal life, if you let him, if the both of you could buck up a little and _try_.

He tenses, this time just in the pelvic region; you’re handling the shoulders, cradling him tight, and his legs are twitching against yours, and he’s suddenly much, much tighter, his body pulsing weakly rather than snapping into orgasm like a steel trap.

“Fuck,” he says into the side of your head. “I love coming on your dick, holy shit.”

“Hold on,” you pant, not yet ready to be all languid and liquid-limbed with him, the pleasurable weight that has been building in your stomach growing heavier and tighter.

“God, yes, in me,” he says, clumsily kissing at your arm where it’s wrapped over his clavicles. “Come on, Jake, please, you know I love that shit.”

One of those things, you know, that he will never stop feeling like he _owes_ Jane and Roxy for. He didn’t trust them or anyone with the outside-y bits, but a combination of the Voiding and the Lifeing has left him safe from one particular anathema of his, the ability to bear children.

Somehow he managed to swap that abstract concept out with Roxy, and Janey cleaned up after to make sure everything else was still mint-in-box condition, working order, and he revels in it, that he will never have to risk a _thing_ growing inside of him.

You could probably ask for the same thing, but that would involve talking to Jane about - about something very sensitive, so you won’t. You get queasy at the sheer idea of having children. You don’t want to watch her face fall as you say that, knowing why. You don’t want an ounce of guilt from her, not for that or for anything.

You just want everything to be normal, for this to _work_ , not to fuck it up this time.

“I love you,” you tell Dirk, spilling into of him with a sense of pure relief, like after a long period of allergies, when you realize all the sudden that you can breathe again.

And you breathe, and you breathe, and you loosen your hold on him a fraction of an inch.

He wriggles his hips as you soften, and you laugh, finally letting him go so you can roll him back over and kiss him properly, all over his face as he wrinkles his nose and frowns, the expression cast in stark relief by your ongoing Hopey lucency.

“My body doesn’t work anymore,” he complains. “Cut it off and keep the head.”

“I like the body,” you say.

“You fucking would, Doctor Frankenstein.”

“That’s Rose, actually. I’d just dress it up in a nice blue gown and have euphemism-laden _tea_ with it until it started to smell. Ask Jade,” you say, smiling.

“Christ, your altself was a creepy fucker. I hope he and my altself made each other fucking miserable.”

“I would imagine they did, if they’re anything like us.”

“A guy could go crazy, thinking about it too hard,” he admits, snuggling up against your chest, then pulling a face. “Are you still wearing clothes? What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” you chuckle, agreeably removing your shirt so he can have a go at feeling up your own reasonably impressive tits. He does so, with great glee. You usually keep very trimmed, but you’re a little fuzzier than usual, after two weeks.

“God, I’d be richer than Dave if I could… market this,” he says, while smooshing your chest together, muffled by the fact that his face is a little shoved into your sternum.

“Five dollars a feel,” you suggest thoughtfully. “Would you buy me a castle?”

“Why the fuck would you need a castle?”

“I’m filling the mansion up quite quickly,” you complain. “In a few years, I’ll need somewhere else to store all my odds and ends and treasures and somesuch. If you’re going to market my tits, buy me a castle. Then we will be square.”

“Mixing business with pleasure probably isn’t a good look,” he concedes, releasing your chest and just laying his head on one pec.

“A few hundred years from now, let’s take a break and just be business partners for a few months.”

“I’ll go into withdrawal.”

“Business partners with benefits, then,” you amend.

“Nah, just, living with you. Being normal with you. Sleeping with you, and seriously not just in the sex way. I think it’s helping me. In the weirdest way, too. Like, Rose and Dave don’t know me well enough to see it, but Roxy does. I’m so fucking happy, Jake, I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Hope magic. Two words. We could get it down to one and say ‘Hope’.”

“Shut up. That’s not what I mean.”

You have a suspicion of your own that that’s exactly what it is, whether he means it or not, but. You’re not about to contradict him in the literal post-orgasm glow you’ve got going on. He snuggles up on your chest and basks in it, and in the radiant warmth of your body, like a cat stretching out in a sliver of sunshine across the carpet.

“I’m glad,” you say. “Either way. I feel the same, in the sense that I think you make me better, and being with you makes me better. And I just plain like it. Having you.”

“Mmmmm.” He settles in with his face pressed against your neck. His eyelashes tickle horribly, and you laugh and shove him away.

“Come on, then, you can have the first shower,” you say. “I think you need it more than I do. I’ve sort of slavvered all over you, whoops.”

“None of that was accidental. You haven’t earned a ‘whoops’.”

He rolls to the edge of the bed, looking small and mussed up and rather sticky. You stand up and button your pants, so as not to be _too_ ridiculous, and he laughs until he registers how you’re looking at him. Sappy and piteous and red as roses, in the Alternian vernacular.

“Shower with me,” he says offhandedly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I need help washing my hair. Some fucking sociopath fucked me senseless, and now I can’t reach above my head, or walk. You probably never met him.”

“Slander, libel, expect to hear from my lawyers in the morning,” you tell him, scooping him up in your arms. He’s never let you shower with him. It’s sacred. This feels a little like a catechism, or it would, if you knew what those were.

“Take me to the shower before I change my mind,” he grumbles.

“You’re awfully cross for a man who just came twice,” you note helpfully.

“When my legs work again I’m kicking your ass.”

“I can hardly wait,” you say, and you really do mean that, about all of it. There is Hope here, capital-H, sure, but also hope, the normal kind, between the two of you. Good days ahead, and a non-negligible number behind you. You don't believe that you could ever stop loving him, not even a little, because there is a fundamental truth to it - he is _worth_ loving.

You don’t see how anyone but a total idiot could possibly fuck this up.

**Author's Note:**

> And they all lived happily ever after, until four months later, when Jake convinced himself that Dirk was being jealous and irrational about his webshow with the ceruleanblood Lesath something-or-other, which he probably sort of was, and everything went to hell.


End file.
